Re: [Wikimedia-l] Joint office Jakarta - Wikimedia Indonesia, HOT Open Street Map, and World Wide Web Foundation

[Tanweer Morshed]

Congratulations to Wikimedia Indonesia for their new office. Wish you all
the best!

Tanweer
Board member
Wikimedia Bangladesh


On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Isabella Apriyana <
isabella.apriy...@wikimedia.or.id> wrote:

> Hi Pine,
>
> We'd be happy to share about our collaboration with HOT-OSM here in
> Indonesia.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Pine W  wrote:
>
> > Thanks Isabella. I might want to talk with you or someone else at
> Wikimedia
> > Indonesia about the relationship of the chapter to OpenStreetMap more in
> > the future. OpenStreetMap is active in what I am hoping will become
> > Wikimedia Cascadia territory and we have already made first contact with
> > one of the OSM organizers. It might also be nice to hear from WMF about
> how
> > their plans for improving mapping functions in the next fiscal year could
> > tie into work with OpenStreetMap. Maybe someone could organize an office
> > hour about the roadmap for location tools. I'm also sending this email to
> > Quim Gil to see if an office hour is feasible.
> >
> > Pine
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 11:28 PM, Isabella Apriyana <
> > isabella.apriy...@wikimedia.or.id> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Pine,
> > >
> > > Every organization has their own administrative staff. WMID only has
> > > project-based paid staff and the rest are volunteers, while other
> > > organizations have full time paid-staff. While for programs, WMID and
> > > HOT-OSM just recently secured a grant from Make All Voices Count [1] to
> > > conduct local open content mapping and encyclopedia writing in
> > Kalimantan,
> > > a generally remote and underdeveloped area in Indonesia.
> > >
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > Isabella
> > >
> > > Ref:
> > > [1]
> > >
> > >
> >
> http://www.makingallvoicescount.org/project/open-content-in-kalimantan-wikipedia-openstreetmap-for-transparency/
> > > .
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Pine W  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Oh, I like hearing about collaborations like this! We are working on
> > > > collaborations with other open source groups here in United States
> > > Cascadia
> > > > also. (The existence of our Cascadia group is pending approval from
> > > > Affcom.)
> > > >
> > > > In addition to sharing a building, are you sharing administrative
> staff
> > > or
> > > > other resources? What programmatic collaborations are you developing?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > >
> > > > Pine
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, Nurunnaby Chowdhury  >
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Congratulation
> > > > > ​ Wikimedia Indonesia!
> > > > >
> > > > > ​--
> > > > > Nurunnaby Chowdhury | @nhasive
> > > > > Sysop, Bengali Wikipedia | User: Nhasive
> > > > > Member, IEG, WMF
> > > > > Sent from my iPhone device​
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Cristian Consonni <
> > > > > kikkocrist...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > 2014-06-23 13:28 GMT+02:00 Tonmoy Khan :
> > > > > > > Congratulations to WMID. Wish you do wonderful activities from
> > your
> > > > new
> > > > > > > address :)
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Go WM-ID! Go!
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Congrats!
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Cristian
> > > > > >
> > > > > > ___
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> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > *Isabella Apriyana*
> > > *Wakil Sekretaris Jendral*
> > >
> > > *(Deputy Secretary General)Wikimedia Indonesia*
> > > Seluler +628889752858/ +6281213700084
> > > Surel isabella.apriy...@wikimedia.or.id
> > >
> > > Dukung upaya kami membebaskan pengetahuan!
> > > http://wikimedia.or.id/wiki/Wikimedia_Indonesia:Donasi
> > >
> > > Support us to free the knowledge!
> > > http://wikimedia.or.id/wiki/Wikimedia_Indonesia:Donasi
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 06/29/2014 03:19 PM, Pine W wrote:
> If you or someone else can suggest reasonable ways to reach 90% confidence
> that identity documents are genuine and that identification information
> will not be compromised while in transit or while at WMF, then I think it
> makes sense to require identification. But so far I am not convinced that
> we can reach either of those thresholds and it sounds like WMF has reached
> the same conclusion.

I'm not privvy to that discussion, but I'd expect that "[...] that does
not unduly exclude valuable volunteers" is also an implicit requirement
of any identification method considered.

Even if you /could/ develop a mechanism by which we had safe and
reliable identification of functionnaries, it'd be worthless if most (or
even just many) of the volunteers we had were unable to avail themselves
of it because of social or geographical constraints.

-- Marc


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy

[Pine W]

Hi Pajz,

The idea that a previously trustworthy functionary or OTRS volunteer might
later go rogue has occurred to me, so let's work with that example for a
moment.

Let's hypothesize that we have a good way (>90% confidence) of verifying
all submitted identity documents and that those documents are retained by
WMF in a way that's highly secure and not likely to be accessible by any
number of governments (>90% confidence). Let's also hypothesize that a
steward has a mental breakdown, gets bribed, develops a personal grudge, or
otherwise becomes compromised. This rogue steward then uses their tools to
discover privacy sensitive information about a handful of other users
before their actions are noticed and stopped. What can WMF do with the
identity document that it has? WMF can take legal action against the rogue
steward, and can blacklist the rogue steward so that they can never again
be a functionary. Both of those sound like good ideas, although the first
might only work if the steward resides in a location which has an effective
law enforcement agency that is willing to cooperate with WMF.

However, it's not clear to me that we can reach 90% confidence about the
authenticity of identification documents, nor is it clear to me that we can
keep identification documents secure from privacy intrusions while they are
in transit and while they are in WMF's custody. I think the latter would be
a big worry for some potential candidates for functionary roles, and it is
imperative that WMF not be perceived as an agency of any government, or an
organization whose neutrality or integrity are compromised.

If you or someone else can suggest reasonable ways to reach 90% confidence
that identity documents are genuine and that identification information
will not be compromised while in transit or while at WMF, then I think it
makes sense to require identification. But so far I am not convinced that
we can reach either of those thresholds and it sounds like WMF has reached
the same conclusion.

Pine



On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Austin Hair  wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Trillium Corsage
>  wrote:
> > (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus
> Canens is said by some to be associated?)
>
> Seriously?
>
> I think you've gone on long enough for now. You can come off
> moderation when you contribute something to the discussion rather than
> attacking others and, dare I say it, just plain ranting.
>
> Austin
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] First _draft_ goals for WMF engineering/product

[Michael Peel]

Hi Erik,

Thanks for sharing this update. It looks like a move in a good direction for 
WMF's engineering.

I am worried by how short-term the current plans/goals are, though. I know that 
a lot of work that the engineering department does, particularly with regards 
software, which can only be planned on a quarterly basis to ensure it's as 
agile and responsive to changing needs as possible. However, there's also the 
long-term view - what the key pieces of work that department wants to get done 
over the course of the next year or longer are - which is currently missing. I 
think this is particularly important for the engineering side of things 
(expected server capacity needs etc.), but it's also relevant for the software 
development side in terms of the larger picture.

Is there a wikipage available somewhere that sets out the long-term 
view/strategic priorities for the engineering department? If not, could I 
encourage you to think about starting one?

Thanks,
Mike

On 27 Jun 2014, at 02:55, Erik Moeller  wrote:

> As an update on the goals process for WMF engineering, we've begun
> fleshing out out the top priorities for the first quarter. Going
> forward, we'll aim to call out the top priorities for each quarter as
> we approach it, to create more shared visibility into the most urgent
> and high-impact projects we're working on.
> 
> I've decided for now to use a division between "User-Impacting
> Changes" and "Cross-Functional Platform and Process Improvements". The
> intent of calling out both areas is to ensure that important
> organizational priorities don't fall off our collective radar. At the
> management level, the intent is for us to pay special attention to the
> priorities called out in this manner, and this may also impact our
> willingness to request help from across the organization if necessary
> to support these priorities, at least in Q1.
> 
> I've merged the current draft into the goals document, here:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Top_departmental_priorities_for_Q1_.28July_-_September_2014.29
> 
> Once again, this is draft and marked as such. The "Impact" column will
> include links to relevant metrics once those are a bit more solid; if
> you look further down in the document you'll see that these are being
> refined and tweaked in multiple areas right now.
> 
> A little bit of rationale for some items that may surprise you:
> 
> - I've decided to list HHVM as the top priority in both categories.
> This is because a) it's a very complex undertaking from an engineering
> perspective and requires significant coordination across development &
> operations, b) it's probably the biggest change regarding how code
> gets executed in production since we adopted PHP in the first place,
> c) the expected performance benefits for many uncached logged-in user
> operations are very significant (I defer to the team to quantify
> before throwing out estimates).
> 
> This is also indicative of the importance we're attaching to site
> performance. There's no question that performance is directly
> correlated with user engagement, and it's appropriate that we spend
> significant effort in this area.
> 
> - We're elevating SUL finalisation (
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SUL_finalisation ) to a top priority,
> and I've classified it as user-impacting. This is because it's on the
> critical path for making it easier to develop cross-site functionality
> (as long as we have to deal with the edge case of "detached accounts",
> certain features that work across wikis are just trickier to
> implement), and one of those long term issues of technical debt we've
> been kicking down the road for years. It's also a pretty complex
> project -- if it goes wrong and we mess up our account database, we're
> in big trouble. So we want to make sure we have lots of eyeballs on
> this from a technical and community management perspective. We may not
> completely wrap up in Q1 since we need to give users whose accounts
> are affected significant warning time, which is just elapsed time we
> can't shorten.
> 
> - Front-end code standardization is called out as a top priority. We
> really need to dig ourselves out of the mess of having disjointed
> templating systems, widget libraries, and JS frameworks across our
> codebase if we want to increase development velocity and UX
> consistency. I'm prepared to sacrifice short term development velocity
> on other projects in order to make this happen.
> 
> - The content API that Gabriel is working on (
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Content_API ) is
> called out as a top priority. This is because the Parsoid output (for
> which the content API will be a high performance front-end) is now
> getting to the point where it's starting to become plausible to
> increasingly use it not just for VisualEditor, but also for views as
> well. The potential here are performance benefits across the board:
> for logged-in u

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy

[Trillium Corsage]

Pine,

An analogous argument to the one you're making is: someone who intends to rob 
your home will be able to get in one way or other, so why bother locking the 
doors when you go out. This is not a good argument.

You're calling into question the reliability of every identification document 
copy ever presented to the WMF by an advanced-rights-seeking administrator 
because a really sophisticated wrongdoer (I dunno, Chinese military 
intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by some to be 
associated?) could make a masterful forgery that beats the system. The fact is 
that 95% of them, I'd suppose, are going to be okay and the identification 
requirement is going to be an effective deterrent to at least the casual among 
the bad apples. And of course, once they've truly identified, the personal 
accountability aspects of it are going to keep in line once well-intentioned 
administrators that might be tempted to go bad for some reason. 

"Forging identification documents is not impossible" is another variation of 
the "perfection is not attainable" and "no policy can be a magical solution" 
arguments put forth previously on this mailing list by the WMF's deputy general 
counsel Luis Villa. I've attempted to answer those by explaining that you can 
have a pretty good and effective policy without having an infallible one.

Trillium Corsage 

29.06.2014, 07:32, "Pine W" :
> Trillium,
>
> I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly
> forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any
> rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone
> who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an
> identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification
> documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people
> creating such documents.
>
> Pine
>
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage 
> wrote:
>>  @Nathan
>>
>>  You said "so if you want to argue that such users should be positively
>>  identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have
>>  conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In
>>  what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom?
>>  What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to
>>  begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary?"
>>
>>  It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification
>>  document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical
>>  suggestions I've "conspicuously avoided." I did at least suggest a secure
>>  filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise
>>  criteria by which an identification document is deemed "good enough," I'd
>>  suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action
>>  officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The
>>  principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum
>>  elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other
>>  elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the
>>  WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a "do the best you
>>  can" and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are
>>  insurmountable obstacles. The answer to "this is hard" is not "well, let's
>>  just stop doing it." The answer is "this is important, let's just do the
>>  best we can."
>>
>>  I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any
>>  verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some
>>  way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a
>>  "verification," but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule.
>>  Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me
>>  attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan
>>  zings me with "what are your specifics" on the mailing list.
>>
>>  "What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with?"
>>  Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to
>>  those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes
>>  some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the
>>  personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability
>>  encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to the
>>  other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and
>>  unrestricted handling of that data, and in fact to some of these people it
>>  indeed yields a MMORPG (multimedia online roleplaying game) environment,
>>  and they will do whatever they want, because they are free from
>>  accountability.
>>
>>  The other key aspect of usefulness is to the rank and file editors. They
>>  will feel better knowing that if some creepazoid or cyberbully starts going
>>  over their IPs, an

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy

[Austin Hair]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Trillium Corsage
 wrote:
> (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus 
> Canens is said by some to be associated?)

Seriously?

I think you've gone on long enough for now. You can come off
moderation when you contribute something to the discussion rather than
attacking others and, dare I say it, just plain ranting.

Austin

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy

[Risker]

Okay, that's enough, Trilliium.  You've now made a personal attack against
an identifiable individual based on gossip and rumour.

Stop.

Risker


On 29 June 2014 10:18, Trillium Corsage  wrote:

> Pine,
>
> An analogous argument to the one you're making is: someone who intends to
> rob your home will be able to get in one way or other, so why bother
> locking the doors when you go out. This is not a good argument.
>
> You're calling into question the reliability of every identification
> document copy ever presented to the WMF by an advanced-rights-seeking
> administrator because a really sophisticated wrongdoer (I dunno, Chinese
> military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by
> some to be associated?) could make a masterful forgery that beats the
> system. The fact is that 95% of them, I'd suppose, are going to be okay and
> the identification requirement is going to be an effective deterrent to at
> least the casual among the bad apples. And of course, once they've truly
> identified, the personal accountability aspects of it are going to keep in
> line once well-intentioned administrators that might be tempted to go bad
> for some reason.
>
> "Forging identification documents is not impossible" is another variation
> of the "perfection is not attainable" and "no policy can be a magical
> solution" arguments put forth previously on this mailing list by the WMF's
> deputy general counsel Luis Villa. I've attempted to answer those by
> explaining that you can have a pretty good and effective policy without
> having an infallible one.
>
> Trillium Corsage
>
> 29.06.2014, 07:32, "Pine W" :
> > Trillium,
> >
> > I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly
> > forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any
> > rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely
> someone
> > who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an
> > identification document. Even in the United States, forging
> identification
> > documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people
> > creating such documents.
> >
> > Pine
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage <
> trillium2...@yandex.com>
> > wrote:
> >>  @Nathan
> >>
> >>  You said "so if you want to argue that such users should be positively
> >>  identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have
> >>  conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be
> confirmed? In
> >>  what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom?
> >>  What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information
> to
> >>  begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary?"
> >>
> >>  It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification
> >>  document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the
> practical
> >>  suggestions I've "conspicuously avoided." I did at least suggest a
> secure
> >>  filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the
> precise
> >>  criteria by which an identification document is deemed "good enough,"
> I'd
> >>  suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action
> >>  officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The
> >>  principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum
> >>  elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other
> >>  elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and
> the
> >>  WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a "do the best
> you
> >>  can" and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these
> are
> >>  insurmountable obstacles. The answer to "this is hard" is not "well,
> let's
> >>  just stop doing it." The answer is "this is important, let's just do
> the
> >>  best we can."
> >>
> >>  I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any
> >>  verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in
> some
> >>  way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would
> be a
> >>  "verification," but I would expect that to be the exception, not the
> rule.
> >>  Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me
> >>  attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while
> Nathan
> >>  zings me with "what are your specifics" on the mailing list.
> >>
> >>  "What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with?"
> >>  Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to
> >>  those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It
> establishes
> >>  some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to
> the
> >>  personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability
> >>  encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to
> the
> >>  other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and
> >>  unrestricted h

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Vietnamese wp above 1 M articles and growing

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2014-06-24 04:52, Tanweer Morshed wrote:

That's a great news that the Vietnamese Wikipedia has crossed 1M articles.
What are the significant reasons behind Vietnamese Wikipedia's such growth?
Is it just the usage of such clever Bots (that you have mentioned) or
contribution by the Vietnamese Wikipedians? And actually how does the
Cheer!-bot generate articles? Does it translate articles from English (or
other) Wikipedia? And apart from translating, can it set and maintain
correctly other aspects of Wikisyntax and coding?


A great many of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's recent articles have been 
created automatically using bots, manually with word processors and mail 
merge, or semi-automatically with machine translators like (presumably) 
Google Translator Toolkit. Nonetheless, Cheers!-bot held a moratorium on 
new articles around the million-article mark, so that day was all about 
writing articles the old fashioned way.


Predictably, our bot articles are more infobox than prose. On the other 
hand, they do have correct grammar and wiki syntax, which cannot be said 
for most machine-translated articles, comprehensive as they may be. 
Cheers! is one of our most experienced editors and has done an admirable 
job correcting errors, whereas some machine translator users have 
uploaded incomprehensible articles anonymously, giving us no opportunity 
to engage and educate.


I can't say for certain how Cheers!-bot generates species stubs, but its 
earlier U.S. geographic stubs were "translated" from the Spanish 
Wikipedia's own bot-created stubs. I'm in the process of cleaning them 
up, translating the occasional Spanish place name to Vietnamese. We're 
also integrating our [[vi:Template:Infobox settlement]] with Wikidata, 
to provide more current information with minimal maintenance. For 
example, see the infobox at [[vi:Loveland, Ohio]], which passes only 
three parameters but provides 18 rows of information.


The surge in bot-created stubs has alarmed some members of the 
Vietnamese Wikipedia community. One frequent theme in our village pump 
is that our "depth" at [[m:List of Wikipedias]] has fallen from over a 
hundred (one of the highest) to just 15 (one of the lowest) in a few 
years. Even taking the depth metric with a grain of salt, I think this 
observation has led us to a newfound appreciation for edits, 
non-articles, and maybe even authentic, hand-made articles.


More importantly, the million-article milestone has shed a light on our 
seemingly low number of active editors. Some have expressed concern that 
the steadily rising article count has disincentivized readers from 
creating own articles on their own. So we're discussing some changes to 
our main page and messages to better engage potential contributors. 
We've also integrated tightly with VisualEditor -- the sandbox, "no such 
article" message, and "no search results" message all send users to 
VisualEditor by default -- hopefully lowering barriers to entry.


None of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's bot operators are interested in 
inflating our article count for the sake of. We care deeply about the 
future of our wiki and the health of its community, and we welcome 
feedback from the community at large.


--
Minh Nguyen
Administrator [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]]


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy

[pajz]

Trillium, while I sympathise with several of the points you're making, the
Board has approved the current version of the policy. In light of this,
your insinuation that the Executive Director could simply alter the policy
to her liking seems somewhat far-fetched. Just because staff have not yet
implemented the new version doesn't mean they can just make it disappear.

Nathan, several suggestions have been made how identities can be confirmed.
The proponents of the now-enacted laissez-faire policy continuously suggest
that the Foundation would have had to reinvent the wheel here. However, all
sorts of organizations need to confirm the identity of individuals. Just
look at how banks do it. In Switzerland, you can make a copy of your ID and
have it certified by your post office, then mail it to the WMF along with
your signed confidentiality agreement. In Germany, companies use the
"PostIdent" process which the WMF can use as well (Austria has something
similar), or you go to a bank and have your signature certified. Canada
Post provides a verification service, etc. And what if there are countries
where no such process is available? What's the issue? These users can still
just copy their passports or IDs. The policy still makes sense if we can't
really be certain of the identity of some volunteers, and this could be
reviewed on a case-by-case basis. It's not like we're talking about an
inordinate amount of people here.

Pine, even if we were merely talking about retaining copies of IDs, the
argument misses that there is not only the potential case of volunteers who
intend to misuse the tools already at the time they are given access. Based
on experience from Wikipedia, the much more likely scenario seems to be
that users are indeed valuable community members when they get access but
later become frustrated / change their personality / ... and only then
start to make trouble. If their identity were confirmed at one point, this
would constrain them for all time to come.



On 29 June 2014 08:31, Pine W  wrote:

> Trillium,
>
> I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly
> forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any
> rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone
> who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an
> identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification
> documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people
> creating such documents.
>
> Pine
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage  >
> wrote:
>
> > @Nathan
> >
> > You said "so if you want to argue that such users should be positively
> > identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have
> > conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed?
> In
> > what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom?
> > What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to
> > begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary?"
> >
> > It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification
> > document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical
> > suggestions I've "conspicuously avoided." I did at least suggest a secure
> > filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the
> precise
> > criteria by which an identification document is deemed "good enough," I'd
> > suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action
> > officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The
> > principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum
> > elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other
> > elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the
> > WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a "do the best you
> > can" and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are
> > insurmountable obstacles. The answer to "this is hard" is not "well,
> let's
> > just stop doing it." The answer is "this is important, let's just do the
> > best we can."
> >
> > I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any
> > verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some
> > way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be
> a
> > "verification," but I would expect that to be the exception, not the
> rule.
> > Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me
> > attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan
> > zings me with "what are your specifics" on the mailing list.
> >
> > "What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with?"
> > Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to
> > those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes
> > some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the